Martha-Cecilia Dietrich

This MA project is a phenomenological enquiry into the experience of imprisonment. Drawing on anthropologically informed theories of perception, this film explores the relationship between the physical and the imagined, the inside and the outside, as rendered through the experience of everyday life in prison.

Imagination is central to the construction of reality. Yet, in a prison context, the act of imagining often constitutes alternative spaces for escaping and confronting prison reality. Taking these thoughts into consideration, this project has focused on different aspects of experiencing prison made perceptible through the act of imagining.

The project was conducted over three months as part of a weekly Drama workshop inside HM Styal Prison – one of fourteen women’s prisons in the UK. Based on the methods of Applied Theatre and the collaborative use of photography, sound and video, the project aims to create a dialogue with eight women inmates about the ways they inhabit the prison space.

Bringing visuality and aurality as dimensions of a sensory world to the forefront, the women were encouraged to recreate and perform places, situations and emotions related to their past, present and (possible) future. Imagining these places – often associated with familiarity or safety – and reenacting them, I intended to explore perceived absences and presences as experienced in a prison context.

The terms inside/outside are often understood in their actual physicality, suggesting contained spaces that are separated by defined boundaries. In their simultaneity, the two cognitive processes of displacement from the outside and emplacement to the inside blur this separation, making them both become part of the prisoner’s overall experience of reality. This shapes a temporality specific to prisons: the experience of ‘doing time’.

Theoretical and methodological reflections on the creative process and dialogue with the participants have been brought together as an exhibition in 2009 at Victoria Baths, Manchester. Both film and text are embedded in a dissertation accessible through the Manchester University Library.